Poll Finds Most Americans Now Support Having Barack Obama Personally Come and Seize Every Single Gun, Regardless of Design or Caliber, in Wholesale Slaughter of Second Amendment

That's not what the poll found, precisely, but the NRA's brain trust and whacknuts who blast their firehoses of conservative e-mail have long equated any gun-law reform with a federal takeover of all firearms, so we'll just say that's what Americans now support:

A majority of Americans favor such gun control measures as banning assault weapons and expanding background checks on those who buy guns and ammunition, with support for banning high-capacity ammunition magazines at a new high in ABC News/Washington Post polls.

With Vice President Joe Biden set to present recommendations that were prompted by the Newtown, Conn., school shootings last month, this latest poll shows overwhelming support for certain moves: Eighty-eight percent favor background checks on firearms buyers at gun shows; 76 percent support checks on buyers of ammunition and 71 percent back a new federal database that would track all gun sales.

Like I was saying, the NRA and its kin have fought to erase any distinction between modest gun regulations and obliterating all gun ownership rights. Denying even one sniveling, crotch-scratching manchild his right to populate his closets with semiautomatic weapons is the same as snatching the hunting rifle from every daddy trying to put dinner on the table. So what happens when high-capacity magazines are banned or restricted? Or you can't just casually purchase the weaponry of a Navy SEAL? Or ex-cons are forced to, you know, go through a background check at a gun show?

What about when that happens, but... Obama doesn't actually take the guns? You know, when there are still loads and loads of regular guns and ammo all over the country.

The gun-fetishisizing murder apologists will say it's just the beginning. First—you can hear them saying it now—they came for the atomic bombs, and I didn't have an atomic bomb, so I didn't speak up... but NEXT WE WON'T EVEN BE ALLOWED TO EAT DINNER WITH A STEAK KNIFE!! They'll pretty much say that. But I hope that people, the media and lawmakers, remember that the gun lobby's dire predictions didn't come true the first time around: that minor reforms didn't make Obama take away all the guns. And I hope that some of the gun nuts' less-nutty base will see that they can still go to target practice and Bambi can still be cleanly cut down in the forest even if they can't buy a Bushmaster at 7-11. And then, hopefully and maybe, this frame set up by the gun lobby will come back to haunt them: You can restrict the Second Amendment, just as you can restrict the First, in the name of public interest and personal safety without shredding the Constitution. And thanks to their own simplistic, black-or-white rhetoric, the folks who continue saying that will be marginalized the same way they should have been marginalized all along. One can hope.

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